Betting on favorites esports fans and casual bettors avoid, because it feels boring — small payout, no thrill of catching an upset. That instinct is exactly backwards, and there’s real, decades-old research explaining why.
✅ The Pattern: Underdogs Are Overpriced, Favorites Aren’t
This isn’t a gut feeling or a hot take — it’s one of the most consistently confirmed effects in betting markets, studied for decades across basketball, football, MMA, and horse racing before anyone applied it to esports. It’s called the favorite-longshot bias, first rigorously documented in Snowberg & Wolfers, Journal of Political Economy (2010), and the core finding is simple once you see it:
- Cheap, unlikely outcomes (priced under 20% to win) → systematically overpriced. Bettors love the dream of a huge payout and pay too much for that dream.
- Expensive favorites (priced 70% or higher to win) → systematically underpriced. Nobody gets excited betting on the obvious winner, so the price doesn’t climb as high as the real win rate justifies.
That gap — between what a strong favorite should cost based on how often it actually wins, and what it actually costs because nobody wants to bet on something “boring” — is where the edge lives. Academic studies going back to the early 2000s have confirmed this pattern across dozens of sports and betting formats, and it shows up again and again because the underlying psychology doesn’t change: people bet with their excitement, not their math.
✅ On Prediction Markets, the Bias Runs Even Stronger
Here’s the part specific to markets like Polymarket, and it’s more favorable for a favorites strategy than traditional sportsbooks. A 2026 academic paper analyzing Polymarket’s on-chain order book, “The Anatomy of a Decentralized Prediction Market” (arXiv, 2026), found the classic bias runs in reverse on Polymarket specifically — the paper terms it a “favorite-longshot reversal.” Low-probability tokens showed negative realized returns (confirming they’re overpriced), while high-probability favorites showed positive realized returns (confirming they’re underpriced). Buying the favorite, on average, came out ahead — not occasionally, but as a persistent pattern across the dataset.
✅ Why Betting on Favorites Works Especially Well in Esports
Esports has the same psychology driving underdog overpricing as traditional sports — arguably a stronger version of it. A few reasons this shows up harder in esports specifically:
- Fan culture rewards rooting for the underdog. Upsets get clipped, shared, and talked about for weeks. A boring favorite win gets forgotten by the next match.
- Casual bettors chase the big payout on a lesser-known team. A 300% payout on an unknown squad beating a top org is a much more exciting bet to talk about than a 15% payout on the favorite winning as expected.
- Roster and meta knowledge is unevenly distributed. Casual bettors often don’t track recent roster changes, patch impacts, or head-to-head history closely enough to price a match accurately — they bet on name recognition and vibes, which skews money toward flashy underdog stories.
None of that means favorites always win — obviously they don’t. It means the price doesn’t move enough to reflect how often they actually do, and that gap between real win probability and market price is the entire edge.
⚠️ The Honest Part: This Isn’t Free Money
Before treating this as a guaranteed strategy, a few things are worth knowing — because pretending otherwise would be dishonest:
- The edge is concentrated at higher prices. Research specifically testing this approach found meaningful edge mainly shows up at 70%+ favorite pricing — not every slight favorite, just the strong ones. Betting on a 55% favorite doesn’t carry the same edge as betting on an 80% favorite.
- Execution costs eat into the edge. Slippage and fees on each individual trade shrink the theoretical advantage, and on thin-liquidity esports markets this can eat a meaningful chunk of it. Using limit orders instead of market orders makes a real, measurable difference — takers have historically lost around 32% more in execution costs than makers on comparable trades.
- You need real volume before you know if it’s working. A handful of wins doesn’t prove an edge exists — variance alone can look like skill over a small sample size. This strategy plays out over dozens or hundreds of bets, not five or ten.
- There’s a competing explanation worth taking seriously. Some researchers argue part of the apparent favorite bias comes from how outcomes are framed — “Yes” contracts pricing differently than “No” contracts on the same underlying probability — rather than being purely about favorite-versus-underdog status. This is an active research question, not settled science, and it’s worth tracking results split by framing type if you’re testing this seriously.
This is a real, researched pattern — not a guaranteed win, and not something that survives sloppy execution or emotional overrides (“but I really think the underdog wins this one”).
My Own Numbers So Far
I’ve been running this on esports favorites myself: flat stakes, sticking to strong favorites (70%+), avoiding thin-liquidity matchups where slippage would wipe out the edge. So far I’m up around $300. You can see the account here — it’s not a huge number, and it’s not a promise that it repeats for anyone else who tries this, but it’s real, it’s live, and anyone can check it.
How to Actually Try Betting on Favorites in Esports
- Stick to strong favorites — 70%+ implied probability, not every match where one side is slightly favored
- Use limit orders, not market orders — the execution cost difference between the two is bigger than most people account for
- Track results over a real sample — dozens of bets minimum before drawing any conclusion about whether it’s working for you
- Avoid thin-liquidity markets — slippage on illiquid esports matchups can quietly erase the whole edge
- Don’t chase the underdog payout dream — that exact instinct is what keeps this edge alive for everyone still doing it
If you want to follow along or try this yourself, my account is public here — flat stakes, favorites only, results visible to anyone.
